The forgotten Detroit Pistons player who should have made NBA 75th anniversary team

The NBA recently released its 75th anniversary all-time basketball team.  Some players were surprised to be on it, while others were disappointed they were not named. Four players who played most of their career with the Detroit Pistons made it, but there probably should have been a fifth: And you probably never heard of him: George Yardley.

The Pistons, as a franchise, are older than the NBA. Fred Zollner, who owned a piston factory in Fort Wayne, Indiana, started the club in 1937. The team joined the NBA in 1948 (legend has it, the papers to form the league were drawn up on Zollner’s kitchen table), and then moved to Detroit in 1957.

Pro basketball had a long history of failure in Detroit. The Pistons being a success was certainly not guaranteed. Four teams had tried to establish themselves in Detroit, only to fold within a year or two (Fun fact: one of them, the Detroit Gems, eventually became the Los Angeles Lakers).

However, there was one big reason for sports fans to check out the new pro basketball team in town: George Yardley.

The 6-foot-5 forward out of Stanford was an established NBA star by the time he arrived in the Motor City. He had led the Pistons to the NBA finals in both 1954 and 1955.

But Yardley, in that first year in Detroit, scored like no one else in the history of the NBA. First, he broke George Mikan’s single-season scoring record of 1,938 points. He finished the year with 2,001 points and led the NBA with a 27.8 points average.

No player had ever scored 2,000 points before. He won the scoring title by three percentage points over the next highest average.

That first season, the Detroit Pistons would reach the Western Conference finals (in the East-centric NBA of the time, Detroit was considered a western team), where they fell to the eventual champion St. Louis Hawks in five games.

With the help of Yardley’s star power, NBA basketball was now established in Detroit.

After getting into a disagreement with Zollner, Yardley was traded away to Syracuse (now the 76ers) midway through the following season. He averaged 20.2 points in 1959-60 for Syracuse, and then retired at age  31.

An engineering grad from Stanford, Yardley went back to his native Southern California and started the George Yardley Company, which is still around to this day (he passed away in 2004).

The Pistons had drafted the Hollywood-born Yardley in 1950 but he made as much money as an engineer in California. And he was not keen on moving in the winter-time from sunny California to Fort Wayne.

It took three years for Zollner (with a then-massive contract offer of $9,000) to lure him from L.A. to Indiana.

If he had played those three years, plus stayed in the NBA, when he was obviously still posting big scoring numbers, Yardley might have been a lock for the 75th anniversary team.

The case for George Yardley on the NBA 75th anniversary team

In seven seasons, Yardley made the All-Star team six times and All-NBA twice. He finished with impressive career averages of 19.2 points, 8.9 rebounds and 1.7 assists. For his time, he shot an impressive 42-percent from the field and 78-percent on foul shots.

There was no three-point line during his time. Known for his outside shooting prowess, Yardley  would have added a couple more points to his scoring average, if there was.

Yardley was also a clutch player. In 46 playoff games, he averaged 20.6 points. He scored 25 points a game for Syracuse in 1959, as they took the Bill Russell-led Boston Celtics to seven games in the Eastern Conference finals.

Yardley was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 1996.

Besides his short career, Yardley’s other big stumbling block into making the 75th anniversary team was that he was never a self-promoter. When Yardley’s family was brought back to Detroit to honor the 50th anniversary of his 2,000 point season, they talked about how their father rarely mentioned his basketball career to them.

Of course, most of the voters never saw George Yardley in action. However, if doing an all-history team of the top 75 players, he should be mentioned. From 1954-60, Yardley was one of the top players in the NBA.